Evolutionary Theorising in Economics

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard R. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Evolutionary Economics ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Neoclassical Economics ◽  
Economic Discourse ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
Evolutionary Thought ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

This chapter deals with evolutionary theorising in economics, first by considering two quite different ways in which evolutionary arguments have entered economic discourse. In particular, it discusses the link between economic dynamics and evolutionary theory in biology, citing the views espoused by Adam Smith in his book The Wealth of Nations. It then examines the argument put forward by a number of economists that modern neoclassical economics and evolutionary theory in biology are basically the same thing. It also outlines the similarities and differences between several contemporary strands of evolutionary economic theorising. The chapter proposes an alternative kind of economic evolutionary theorising and how it fits with other bodies of evolutionary thought in the social sciences, and especially in terms of evolutionary epistemology. Finally, it outlines the way scholars outside of economics are embracing evolutionary economics by developing evolutionary theories of processes of economic, social, and cultural change in their own fields.

The Social Philosophy of Smith's “wealth of Nations”

Philosophy ◽  
1927 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 39-51
Author(s):  
John Laird
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Short Discussion ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Scientific Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
General Principles Of Law ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Historical Treatment

When Adam Smith, at the age of forty, resigned his professorship in Glasgow and devoted himself, after three years of travel, to the composition of his Wealth of Nations, he set himself to elaborate the sociological portion of his course on Moral Philosophy. Indeed, at the conclusion of his Moral Sentiments, written during the tenure of his professorship, he had promised “ another discourse ” on the “ general principles of law and government,” including a historical treatment and an account of “ police, revenue and arms.” To be sure, when the work appeared, it was not, in essentials, a continuation of the researches of Montesquieu, and had no authentic connection with Smith’s earlier treatise on morals, Instead, the bulk of it was a strict, and as we should say, a scientific (not a philosophical), inquiry into the origin and conditions of opulence in human communities. Nevertheless, it expounds and is even dominated by a certain social philosophy which is not too convincing when nakedly put. Smith's abiding fame, accordingly, rests more upon the strict scientific analysis of his book than upon its implicit philosophy. Still, the philosophy was there. It had, and it still has, influence. A short discussion of it, therefore, is likely to have something more than historical interest.

scholarly journals Business Ethics in Adam Smith’s works

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 21-32
Author(s):  
Stefan Zabieglik
Keyword(s):  
Business Ethics ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Ethical Problems ◽  
The Social ◽  
Property Owners ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Theory Of Moral Sentiments

This paper presents some views of Adam Smith based on some selected problems of business ethics. These can be found in his famous works—The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations—and in his lectures at the Glasgow University, where he was a professor of moral philosophy in 1752–1764. The main argument of the paper is that ethical problems (presented mainly in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) are also present in his political economy, which contradicts some neoliberal interpretations of his works as ones of the “intellectual father of capitalism”. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith criticizes each social class because of the fact that its interests are incompatible with the good of the whole society. He condemned the monopolist efforts of the traders and entrepreneurs, described some property owners as “vain egoists” and advanced the interests of the poor. He maintained that the interests of the traders should be supported when these were compatible with the interest of the consumers. The desire for possession and wealth should be analyzed from the social point of view: It is good when it contributes to the common good and the reproduction of humankind.

EQUITY, BESIDES: ADAM SMITH AND THE UTILITY OF POVERTY

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Labor Supply ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Supply Function ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

Generations of readers have nodded in agreement with Adam Smith’s argument, in Book One of the Wealth of Nations, that a nation cannot be happy if the workers who constitute the majority of its population are miserable. Smith notes that equity, besides, demands that workers receive a generous recompense for their labor. I contend that this famous statement is best interpreted in light of contemporary arguments that it was socially useful for workers to be poor. Smith’s engagement with these arguments is usually interpreted with reference to the labor supply function, but I argue that it also involved deeper suppositions about the place of workers in the social order. Smith’s reaction to these suppositions enriches our understanding of his contribution to liberal economics.

scholarly journals Blackstone's Science of Legislation

1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The North ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Law And Legislation ◽  
The University

In 1795, Dugald Stewart, the professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and reigning Athenian of the North, observed in a famous estimate of the career of Adam Smith that “the most celebrated works produced in the different countries of Europe during the last thirty years” had “aimed at the improvement of society” by “enlightening the policy of actual legislators.” Among such celebrated productions Stewart included the publications of François Quesnay, Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, Pedro Campomanes, and Cesare Beccaria and, above all, the writings of Smith himself, whose Wealth of Nations “unquestionably” represented “the most comprehensive and perfect work that has yet appeared on the general principles of any branch of legislation.” One of the more striking achievements of recent scholarship on eighteenth-century social thought has been to make sense of this description of Smith's Inquiry and to enable us better to appreciate why Smith chose to describe his system of political economy as a contribution to the “science of a legislator.” In a cultural setting in which, as J. G. A. Pocock has put it, “jurisprudence” was “the social science of the eighteenth century,” law and legislation further featured, in J. H. Burns's formula, as “the great applied science among the sciences of man.” Moralists and jurists of the period, echoing earlier political conventions, may readily have acknowledged with Rousseau that “it would take gods to give men laws.” Nevertheless, even in Rousseau's program for perfecting “the conditions of civil association”—“men being taken as they are and laws as they might be”—a mortal “legislator” appeared plainly “necessary.”

Evolution in Political Science: A Reply to Kerr

2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Kay
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Evolutionary Economics ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Great Benefit ◽  
Dynamic Approach ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
Dynamic Mechanisms

Peter Kerr ( Kerr 2002 ) recently argued in this journal that evolutionary theories could be of great benefit to political scientists' investigations of change. He is not successful in establishing a case for evolutionary theory in political science due to the misconception that evolutionary theory can have explanatory power without being functionalist. Two options for the use of evolution in political science are set out: firstly, leave the concept at the level of metaphor which might add richness to narratives of political change; or secondly, accept functionalism and construct political science theories along the lines beginning to develop in evolutionary economics. The conclusion is the need for a dynamic approach whilst avoiding functionalism and that political science at this stage should remain agnostic and critical about when and where particular dynamic mechanisms may operate.

Looking for (Economic) Growth in the Eighteenth Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 35-55
Author(s):  
Christian Marouby
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
Stage Theory ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
The Social ◽  
Biological Analogy ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

In the context of the book’s emphasis on “Systems of Life” in the social sciences in the eighteenth century, this chapter seeks to interrogate the conception of growth, an evidently biological analogy, in the work of two major founders of the discipline of economics, François Quesnay and Adam Smith. Taking its cue from a famous passage in the Wealth of Nations, the first part investigates the surprisingly discreet physiological conceptions in the non-medical writings of the theorist of physiocracy. While recognizing significant parallels between the biological and economic systems developed by Quesnay, particularly with regards to circulation, this first investigation fails to produce a model of economic growth based on physiological principles. The second part turns to the thought of Adam Smith himself, in which can be found not only an explicit analogy between physical health and that of the economy, but a clear conception of economic growth. But if it is tempting to find in Smith’s economics a system akin to that of life, a close examination of his theory of growth makes it even clearer than with Quesnay that its fundamental principle is not physiological, but sociological, grounded as it is in a stage theory of historical development.

Two Intellectual Landmarks in the Year 1749

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-123
Author(s):  
Farhad Rassekh
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Considerable Extent ◽  
Monetary Theory ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
Classical Economics ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Economic Thinking

In the year 1749 Adam Smith conceived his theory of commercial liberty and David Hume laid the foundation of his monetary theory. These two intellectual developments, despite their brevity, heralded a paradigm shift in economic thinking. Smith expanded and promulgated his theory over the course of his scholarly career, culminating in the publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Hume elaborated on the constituents of his monetary framework in several essays that were published in 1752. Although Smith and Hume devised their economic theories in 1749 independently, these theories complemented each other and to a considerable extent created the structure of classical economics.

scholarly journals HOW SHOULD WE RECONCILE SELF-REGARDING AND PRO-SOCIAL MOTIVATIONS? A RENAISSANCE OF “DAS ADAM SMITH PROBLEM”

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-102
Author(s):  
Natalie Gold
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Crowding Out ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Intrinsic Motivations ◽  
Social Motivations ◽  
Motivation Crowding ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Selfish Agents

Abstract“Das Adam Smith Problem” is the name given by eighteenth-century German scholars to the question of how to reconcile the role of self-interest in the Wealth of Nations with Smith’s advocacy of sympathy in Theory of Moral Sentiments. As the discipline of economics developed, it focused on the interaction of selfish agents, pursuing their private interests. However, behavioral economists have rediscovered the existence and importance of multiple motivations, and a new Das Adam Smith Problem has arisen, of how to accommodate self-regarding and pro-social motivations in a single system. This question is particularly important because of evidence of motivation crowding, where paying people can backfire, with payments achieving the opposite effects of those intended. Psychologists have proposed a mechanism for the crowding out of “intrinsic motivations” for doing a task, when payment is used to incentivize effort. However, they argue that pro-social motivations are different from these intrinsic motivations, implying that crowding out of pro-social motivations requires a different mechanism. In this essay I present an answer to the new Das Adam Smith problem, proposing a mechanism that can underpin the crowding out of both pro-social and intrinsic motivations, whereby motivations are prompted by frames and motivation crowding is underpinned by the crowding out of frames. I explore some of the implications of this mechanism for research and policy.

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